“cuck” or “cuckservative”

What does cuck mean?

A cuck is a derogatory slang term for a weak, effeminate, or inadequate man. Cuck has also been blended with conservative to produce cuckservative, often shortened back to cuck. Both cuck and cuckservative are especially used online by white nationalists to insult US Republican politicians they judge as insufficiently conservative.

Where does cuck come from?

Cuck is shortened from cuckold, a term that has been belittling the “husband of an unfaithful wife” since the 1200s. The word cuckold derives from a French word for the cuckoo bird. Just as the female cuckoo lays eggs in other birds’ nests, so a cuckold’s wife, as it’s said, sleeps in another man’s bed.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang notes that cuckold was abbreviated to cuck as early as the 16th century, but it appears the word underwent a second, independent clipping in the 2000s. A 2007 entry in Urban Dictionarydefines cuck to mean the same thing as a stronger four-letter word that it conveniently rhymes with.

In online message boards like 4chan over the 2010s, cuck slang developed racist and misogynistic undertones, according to left-wing cucks. Cuck porn, for instance, describes a genre of pornography featuring white husbands watching their wives have intercourse with black men. Among others, the implication is that such a husband is so weak he can’t do anything to stop her and so submissive he even observes the act. As linguist Mark Liberman explained on Language Log, cuck “was extended figuratively on 4chan to reference ‘relinquished manliness’ and more abstractly ‘selling out, abandoning principles.’”

In this vein, Know Your Meme points out two notable examples. First, the boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, who suffered extreme harassment during the 2014 Gamergate controversy, was called “beta cuck” over his allegations Quinn cheated on him. Then, later that year, comedian Louis C.K. was labeled a “cuck” in resentment of progressive views he expressed in his standup.

While it’s unclear exactly who coined it and when, cuck blended with conservative, yielding cuckservative. The term first appeared on Twitter in 2010, when it was used as a hashtag. This spread among white nationalists online, and they leveled cuckservative at conservative politicians they felt were too sympathetic or accommodating to mainstream, inclusive, and pro-minority policies—to them, these politicians were surrendering their conservative values like cucks giving over their beds.

Cuck rose to prominence during the 2016 US presidential election. In August 2015, TheNew York Times reported that the hashtag #cuckservative peaked during the GOP debates, when many social media users slammed Republican candidates who had “veered too far to the left.” Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, told the paper: “It’s a very good shorthand meme to express a certain kind of frustration and a certain kind of contempt for mainstream conservatives.”

By 2016, internet users were commonly clipping cuckservative back to cuck. The force of the words had diluted as they seeped into mainstream usage, with many on the political right decryingestablishment Republicans as cucks without knowledge of its seedier origins. Members of the American Dialect Society even nominated the two words for their 2016 Word of the Year in a category called “WTF.”

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